Intuition by Allegra Goodman

Science

Intuition

Cliff Bannaker, hero or fiend? Bannaker, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard's Mendelssohn-Glass lab released research that rocked the scientific and medical communities. His R-7 virus seems to have a startling effect on laboratory mice - their tumors disappear when treated with Bannaker's virus, and those results could mean a cancer cure in the making. But is Bannaker's research too good to be true? Bannaker was working with a virus he concocted in the lab when fellow researchers noticed that some mice treated with the R-7 virus had drastically reduced tumors. The research news spread rapidly, partly thanks to Sandy Glass, one of the top researchers in the lab, and an unashamed publicity hound. Glass urged Bannaker to release his amazing results, and the publicity started pouring in. People magazine and others did stories on Bannaker and the lab, gaining it public notoriety and a hefty government research grant. The trouble was, now that the entire lab was devoted to Bannaker's project, they couldn't replicate his research results, and other labs were having trouble, too.

At first, the lab, and its co-chairs, Glass and Marion Mendelssohn, support Bannaker's research and results. They rush to publish them in the journal Nature, and that's when the public begins to notice the group at the lab. Sandy and Marion are almost like surrogate parents to the lab workers who are all now headed down the R-7 research path. All but one, Robin Decker. Pulled off her own project, Robin begins the story as Cliff's girlfriend, but when she can't replicate his findings, she begins to suspect they might be false, and after they break up, she begins to call attention to his laboratory methods and his results. Sandy and Marion pull her off her own research project to work on Cliff's, and her jealousy and anger at that help fuel her desire to pull the rug out from under Cliff and his conclusions.

Her accusations turn into a costly legal battle that rages from the lab to Washington DC and across the country. The National Institute of Health (NIH) investigates Robin's claims and initially substantiate them, but their ruling is overruled when it is discovered their decision was politically motivated. Cliff seems vindicated, but Marion still suspects his work, although he will never admit he falsified his research conclusions. It does seem, however, that his methods were faulty. He thinks, "Still aspects of his data were so compelling that in his mind they outweighed everything else. He had sifted out what was significant, and the rest had floated off like chaff" (Goodman 322). In the end, Cliff is out of the research project, Robin is long gone, Sandy and Marion have gone on to separate labs, and the entire project ends in failure, with other research looking promising. The controversy surrounding the lab continued for some time, but the real problem with this research was that the lab's leaders were so willing to release their research in such a hurry, without collaborating data from follow-up studies. Their lack of foresight was really their downfall, and the crux at the heart of this story. If they did it, how many other labs do it too, and how much research is suspect?

Ultimately, Cliff's story and the controversy surrounding it is a study in ethics, and that's the real issue for us here at the Globe. Sandy and Marion knew the results were preliminary, but they chose to release them to Nature anyway. That was unethical and unprofessional. Marion fought against it, but Sandy won out with his attitude they had to release to get a lock on the research. He tells Marion, "We can't afford to wait six months for the review. In the meantime, everyone and his brother is going to try this" (Goodman 71). It is Sandy's need for attention and publicity that helps fuel the situation, and he should be held accountable for the results. Cliff's research may have been sloppy, but a review would have indicated that, and created far less controversy as a result.